Quickie game review: Skyrim

Skyrim is another installment in the Elder Scrolls series. It attempts to incorporate a more structured story-line on top of the basic Morrowind/Oblivion system (tweaked a bit). It is fun, but suffers from the same major flaw that both Morrowind and Oblivion had: it is hard-ish early, but at a point not too far into the game it gets so easy that it seems pointless to continue. I continued to play past that point, completing a number of quests that involved killing bad guys with one hit – and never even taking the slightest damage myself. But, it was a joyless affair. The “dragon” and even more so, the “uprising” storylines did not seem very interesting. The dragons were more of a bother than anything else, and the dragon-related power-ups were completely ignorable. So, it is a fun game to play around with, and there is some challenge early, but the mid-to-late game imbalances, the repetitive and pointlessly easy quests, and the outright bugs – and weird bug-like oddities – sucked the life out of it. It is a pretty game to look at, but it feels like a lot more went into the looks than the actual game-play. 3.5 out of 5.